


heart of gold

by Rabbitt



Category: Haven (TV)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-16
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-06-08 16:21:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6862789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rabbitt/pseuds/Rabbitt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two dead men walk into the light.</p><p>(Stop me if you've heard this one before.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	heart of gold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tarlan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tarlan/gifts).



> For Tarlan. Thanks so much.

William’s hands are warm and broad and roughened from building his ship. With a great deal of care, he wraps them around Duke’s throat.

“Is this how he did it?” he asks.

“No,” Duke says, and it is almost a lie: the angle is all wrong, William standing in front of him and using just his hands, his forearm dirty and unmarked. But something about it, in a way, feels a lot like dying.

“You know," William muses, and shoves forward, pushing Duke backward so he has to catch himself, backing him up until his shoulderblade hits gnarled bark. "I thought Nathan and I really bonded when he was vacationing over here. But we never got up to this. Shame, really.”

“If you touch him, I’ll kill you,” Duke says, and he means it: past tense, future, always.

William laughs, low in his throat, almost a growl. He leans in, breath hot. “Oh, that is rich. Pretty Boy gets to kill you with his bare hands, and somehow I’m the bad guy here? I should warn you, I’m very hard to kill. And I think you can die. You’ve done it once.”

Duke bares his teeth. “Didn’t quite take.”

William smiles.

Duke can feel his heart knocking in his chest. It’s different, being dead in the void. It feels more like being alive.

When he had been dead in the real world he couldn’t feel things, not like this - not the clear cold autumn light of the sun on his skin or the earthy smell of Haven changing seasons - but he knew things, the way he knew Lizzie could be magicked back to life if Dwight believed it hard enough, just because she was dead and so was he, or the way he knew exactly where Nathan was even if he couldn’t see him, like a compass pointing due north.

“That’s because the dead don’t belong there,” William says, hands staying steady on Duke’s throat. He doesn’t squeeze. Doesn’t let up. “But you? You belong _here_ . You’re _from_ here.”

“The hell are you talking about,” Duke says. Duke knows what he is. Where he came from. “I’m not from this place.”

“Not that pathetic consciousness or all those sad little memories you’re hauling around,” William says. “But this form? Your body’s rotting away somewhere in that little town you left behind. This is all new hardware. Oh, she is brilliant. Don’t you get it? Mara did something to you.”

“I know.”

“Don’t be melodramatic. I mean _she did something to you._ Physically, and I don’t just mean she shivered your timbers. She changed you. Stuffed you like a pinata full of aether. And now you’re dead and the aether’s still here. And here? This is where it’s from. This is where it belongs.”

Duke does not belong anywhere. He shifts and the leaf litter crunches beneath him. The trees don’t smell like trees here. More like ozone, and a little bit like an electrical short. Burning plastic.

William is still watching him, carefully, eyes like a hunting dog. Hungry and sharp. He smells a little like ozone too. Like lightning. 

“Why else are you here, Duke?” he asks. “Last I heard the three musketeers were all set to save the world. And now you’re dead. Oops.”

Duke holds his gaze. William is haloed against the sky. The sky doesn’t really look like the sky the way the trees don’t smell like trees. There are no birds in the woods, no clouds of insects, no sound except for their voices and William’s steadying breath and the curious, hollow echo of the place, like they’re in a vast cavern he can’t see the edges of, or the edge of a canyon.

“Croatoan came back,” he says dully. “Mara’s father.”

“And?” William asks, pressing his knee forward, between Duke's knees. “What is that, the short version?”

“Yes,” Duke says. He doesn’t pull out of William’s hold. There’s a callous on the base of William’s thumb, mount of venus, that he can feel scratching against his skin, put there from a makeshift hammer, felling trees, hauling wood around, digging through the soil to find the broken pieces of the Barn.

William is building a spaceship out of wood.

“It’s not a spaceship,” William says. He shifts closer, chest to chest and knees to knees, and Duke breathes in the smell of him. “Well. In the sense of a vehicle designed for transport through - you know what, just think of it as a spaceship. It’ll be simpler for you.”

“How’s it supposed to work, anyway?” Duke asks. “Nathan took the controller. I thought the Barn needed that to run.”

“A car won’t run without an engine,” William agrees patiently. “But an engine won’t get you very far without a car, either. I’ve got to start building somewhere.”

“Why?” Duke says. “Why do you want to build a Barn, anyway? Nathan gave you the ring. You can just go. Get out of this place.”

William sighs. His hands shift off of Duke's throat and Duke breathes in.

“Yes, and it was a very thoughtful gesture. But Charlotte’s ring is a bit of a one-way ticket. Let’s just say I’m not really very popular back home right now. And it’s not a Barn. It’s going to be something much better than that. The Barn was very, very clever, I’ll grant you, because Mommy Dearest might’ve been a loon but she was never an idiot, but it was complicated the way a prison was complicated. It was about containment, not joyriding.”

“The Barn could travel. We saw it move.”

“Sure, on a set schedule. Look, an elevator can move, it can get you to the first floor or the second floor, but it can’t get you to the third floor on the of the building across the street, can it?”

“And is that where you want to go?” Duke demands. “The building across the street?”

William shrugs. His fingers crawl down Duke's shoulders, keep him pressed against the tree. “Anywhere but here, as the postcard says.”

“What the hell is this place, anyway?”

“It’s the void.”

“I know that. What does that _mean?”_

“You want a lesson in quantum physics?”

“Way I see it, I’ve got some time to kill.”

Duke is good at games. He learned from the best. So did William.

This is what they're doing: playing, for keeps, for Duke's death and Duke's mouth and Duke's ticket home. For William's heart.

“All right,” William considers. He smooths Duke's jacket down his chest. “Think of it this way. You look like a guy who’s been up a back alley or two. Say you’re in some shitty bar in Boston, have a couple drinks, want to slip out the back way. So you open up the backdoor and step out into an alleyway. Okay, so what if you’re in another shitty bar in another shitty town, say you’re in Berlin this time. You have a drink or six and go out the backdoor and step out into that same alleyway. Not an alley that looks kind of the same or smells kind of the same, but the exact same one, existing simultaneously behind two bars an ocean apart from each other. One space, accessible through a doorway in Boston and a doorway in Berlin.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Okay, but what if it was? Work with me here. That’s what the void is. Liminal space. The overflowing dumpster in the alleyway between worlds. Now, can I ask you a question?”

“Fine,” Duke says, warily.

“Why are you here?”

“I died. Suffocation,” Duke says. “It’s a real bitch. But there’s worse ways to go.”

William smiles. “There surely are.”

“They didn’t save me,” Duke says. “Is that what you want to here? They could’ve, we could’ve, we’ve done it before. We brought Nathan back from the dead. I jumped into the Barn for Audrey. All Dwight had to do was _fucking_ believe _, they should have saved me,_ and they just, they didn’t even _try -”_

He cuts himself off, anger burning out all at once, like a candle snuffed out. It was not, he knows with certainty, and Audrey and Nathan’s fault. He asked them for this. He brought this upon himself.

William is watching him keenly, head cocked, and he can tell the moment William sees his rage is gone, fists unclenching.

“Oh,” William says, disappointed. “For just a moment there, you were almost interesting.”

This, Duke knows, is a lie.

William has always found him interesting.

“Go on,” William says “Get _mad._ Get angry. Aren’t you pissed? Don’t you want to get back at them?”

“What are you talking about?”

“We could destroy them. We could burn down their entire world. We could ruin them, for what they did.”

“I bet that’s what you say to all the girls,” Duke says, meaning, _I bet that’s what you said to Mara._ “You know what I think? I think you just like wrecking shit.”

William shrugs. “Maybe so.”

“Why the fuck do you care, anyway?”

“Because you’re dead. You’re dead and you’re here, and that’s the question you ask the dead. Besides, Mara must have seen something in you. There must be something that makes you interesting. So come on. Why are you here?”

“Is that the only question you got? Why don’t you ask me about Mara, about me and your girlfriend? Don’t you want to know? You want to know if I was better? If she liked me more? Want to know what we did? If she was on top? What she tasted like? How many times I got her to come?”

William shrugs. “I know what she likes.”

“Yeah,” Duke says. “Me.”

There’s a navigation technique Duke has used at sea. Dead reckoning. Figuring out where you are based on where you were. Calculate how fast you’re going with how long you’ve been traveling to figure out how far you’ve come. Factor in currents.

Duke has no idea how long it’s been, or how fast he’s going. No idea where he is.

"Why are you here?" William says again.

“Because I’m dead. Because I asked for it. I wanted to die. Is that what you want to hear? I gave up. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I killed myself.”

"Huh," William says. "Worse ways to go."

"Yeah," Duke agrees.

William leans in, the weight of him on Duke's ribs, pressed between hands and trees. Pinned. William's mouth is over his mouth. Close enough to kiss.

"When I build this ship," he whispers. "I can go anywhere. To Haven. To my home. To where Mara came from, where Audrey did. Anywhere else. All the doors will be open to me. Not just the one Charlotte's ring opens."

Duke listens to his heart thudding in his chest. The quiet lack of birds in the woods. 

"Come on, Duke," William says. "Pick a door."


End file.
